I received a Dell Christmas circular today, all 28 pages of it. The cover displayed a nice red Dell laptop, a mini-tower, printer, two green Christmas tree balls, a Canon camera and a Palm Treo (it was too small to actually tell). The mini-tower was priced at $429, the laptop $649.
The inside folio displayed other inexpensive, low-margin products and the second spread was hawking a Microsoft Zune MP3 player, Tomtom GPS, Palm Treo and Canon EOS Rebel. Not until you got to page 12 did you see a higher margin product and even that was under $1,000.
Sorry to keep dumping on Dell, a company I truly root for, but they need to focus on computers. (I think they finally got out of the TV business.) Dell needs to stop printing 28-page brochures pushing the “cheese” end of the product line and OOP (other people’s products) and start focusing on making the next iPod of the personal computer industry. Then market. Peace!